WASHINGTON – Leading international environmental organizations coordinated efforts today at more than 350 protests and events across the U.S. and Canada, calling on companies to end the destruction of North America’s largest ancient forest, the Boreal. As part of an international Day of Action to raise awareness about threats to the Boreal, the groups demanded that companies such as Kimberly-Clark, Victoria’s Secret, and Xerox stop using paper that comes from endangered forests in the Boreal in their tissue products, catalogs and copy paper. In addition, advertisements began running in the New York Times and online with FoxNews to highlight the importance of this critical forest.

Protests and events were held in cities as diverse as Birmingham, Ala.; Edmonton, Alberta; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Las Vegas, Nev.; Seattle; Toronto; Tulsa, Okla.; and Wichita, Kans. In suburban Atlanta, activists protested outside of Kimberly-Clark’s operations headquarters, where the company’s vice president of environment and energy works.In New York City, Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping preached outside the Victoria’s Secret in Herald Square and performed a skit involving “saving” a fallen Victoria’s Secret angel.

“The Boreal is irreplaceable, not disposable,” said Brant Olson of Rainforest Action Network.“The Boreal is one of the last great forests on Earth that has not been completely ravaged by unsustainable industrial resource extraction. We will continue to support indigenous communities in their struggle to protect these ancient forests on their ancestral homelands from being turned into disposable paper products by U.S. companies like Xerox.”

“Thousands of concerned citizens in cities across the country are letting companies know that they do not want ancient forests turned into throwaway paper products when viable alternatives exist,” said Pamela Wellner, Greenpeace forest campaigner. “Shoppers are using their dollars to demand that companies like Kimberly-Clark become responsible corporate citizens.”

Roughly 13 times the size of California, the Boreal stretches across North America from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean, forming part of a “green halo” of forest that encircles the Earth just below the Arctic tundra. The Boreal comprises 25 percent of the planet’s remaining ancient forest and is considered as important to global environmental security as the Amazon. Some of the Boreal’s key environmental services include regulating global climate, cleaning the air, purifying water, and serving as a lifebank in a time of unprecedented extinction. Less than eight percent of the Boreal is protected, and approximately half has been designated for resource extraction by the Canadian government. The United States is the largest consumer of wood products from the Boreal, which is logged mostly to provide fiber for throwaway items such as junk mail catalogs, facial tissue, toilet paper, copy paper, magazines, and newspapers.

"The Boreal forest is a key regulator of the world’s climate, and it is being turned into junk mail," said Lafcadio Cortesi of ForestEthics. “Are we really supposed to stand by while Victoria's Secret turns one of the earth's few safeguards against global warming into catalogs?"

North America’s Boreal forest is one of our last great wilderness forests,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It is a crime to destroy it to make tissue and toilet paper that are used once and then thrown away.”